From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jerry Van Baren Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:16:26 -0400 Subject: [U-Boot] U-book and GPLv3? (fwd) In-Reply-To: References: <20090618145128.69F27832E416@gemini.denx.de> <4A49725D.6000508@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4A4A1E3A.8040205@ge.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: u-boot@lists.denx.de Richard Stallman wrote: > Files without a copyright notice and a license notice are a legal problem. > > Legally, every file is copyrighted. If there's no copyright notice, > that just means it gives no info about who the copyright holder is. > > The lack of a license notice is a problem. If the file is trivial, > just a few lines, maybe it does not matter. But otherwise, if there > is no license, that means it doesn't give people permission to copy or > change or redistribute the file. Perhaps even the U-boot developers > don't have this permission. Agreed. I was just doing a simplistic grep looking for "fingerprints" of GPL and BSD licenses and I did not find them in 436 files. I looked at a couple of files to confirm that my greping wasn't over simplistic (it wasn't in the cases I checked). I also did not see any licenses other than GPL or BSD, but I did not look at many of the files in question so it is possible that there are other licenses out there, but probably not. I did *not* analyze the files for complexity and appropriateness of copyright/license information in the file. That should be done regardless of the results of the GPLv3 debate and the files that should have copyright/license information in their headers need to be either fixed or replaced. Best regards, gvb